(This is a more personal variation of my post on the Shizzow blog: Shizzow!)
Over the past 10 months, I've been working on a location-based social web service startup called Shizzow with Sam Keen, Mark Wallaert and Dawn Foster. Today we're finally releasing it into private beta for a select group of Portlanders.
Let me backtrack a bit and talk about how Shizzow came to be. Throughout 2007 I found myself in countless conversations about online social networks, and the recurring theme was that the number of friends that you had was supposed to serve as some sort of an barometer of how important you were or what your status was. My argument over and over again was that friendships, as most things in life, should never be about quantity, but should always be about quality.
